


The Night's Queen

by cyanocorax



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-27
Updated: 2013-03-27
Packaged: 2017-12-06 16:55:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/737975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanocorax/pseuds/cyanocorax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The fire, she knows, will scald her white as a bone, but ice is another matter altogether. Cold preserves.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Night's Queen

**Author's Note:**

> entirely speculative/AU-ish (read: self-indulgent) in nature. probably fucks with the timeline too. i'm so sorry.

The night her father dies, Shireen dreams the strangest of all her dreams. 

She is standing in a dark and endless space, old dust gathering beneath her feet. From the gloom comes bells and cricket song, the rustle of leaves to leaves, and the burning scent of summer, thick as a ghost. A branch breaks, a heart beats, and from the shadow steps a great stag with cold, flat eyes. It gazes at her, smoke rising from its impossibly large head of antlers, blood upon its breast, muscles quivering beneath its skin. It has the hot warmth of a forbidden thing. She wants nothing more than to touch it.

Slowly, with much grandeur and ceremony, it kneels upon the formless earth, and sets its royal head upon the ground. The blood begins to spread, to darken. Shireen makes the unforgivable mistake of blinking; when she snaps her eyes open once again there is nothing before her but the faint outlines of fast-vanishing bones.

This is how queenhood begins for Shireen Baratheon: in an imagined silence, with an imagined corpse, an imagined kingdom bent about her body, boundless, black.

 

 

She has always dreamt. She cannot remember not doing so. Often she is being devoured piecemeal by dragons and other times she is sitting upon a throne made of ash and other times still there is blood and split flesh where her greyscale should be, but always, death is present. The Stranger, hovering over her chest, breathing her breath. 

The day her father leaves, she curtsies dutifully and does her best not to shiver against the wind. He is tall, her father, tall and pale and thin. She does not think she has ever seen him smile. He looks at her now no differently than he always has, coldly, half-perplexed. He says, “I will return, soon.”

 _Liar._ Shireen nods. 

Later she supposes that it was not all untrue. His men bring his scorched, white bones back in a box soon enough, and at night she thinks she hears them clatter, speaking to one another, to her. It is all in a language in which she is fluent — the tongue of the deceased. 

 

 

The wildlings think she does not hear their whispering, _Unclean. Unclean. Better to have never been born._ They think she does not know. She is a child, not a fool. None of them will touch her, will let their gaze linger upon her. _Unclean. Unclean._

“They’ve always burned their dead,” one of her mother’s knights says; “Always. Mayhaps they’ve known all along.” 

Shireen touches her cheek in the dark of each passing night. They want to give her a pyre. They want to cut out her heart. 

She will not let them.

 

 

“You are a queen now. Do you understand what this means?” Her mother’s grip is iron. Her eyes are narrowed. She kisses Shireen, stiffly, upon the brow. “Of course you do. I’ve taught you well.” Her hands reach out to rearrange Shireen’s hair, tuck loose strands behind her ears, fix her furs. “You look like him.” She’s always said so. “You have his eyes.” 

Shireen blinks them, whispers, “What do we do now?”

Selyse gives her a fierce shake. “We pray. We pray the Lord of Light will protect us.”

 _He did not protect my father._ Shireen bites her tongue. She could ask how it was a god could let his chosen die in such a way, in the cold and the wild, but that would only make her mother show fear, and Shireen does not quite desire such an outcome, not truly. She waits until she tastes blood, before nodding, but she knows the way of it. It was the winter that killed her father and all the Red Gods in all the world could do nothing to stop it.

When she is next alone in their chambers she steps to the box of bones and kneels before it, raises the lid. The skull sits atop a pile of arms and legs and ribs; his spine curves about the edge in a broken ring. She picks up her father’s head, staring deep into the empty holes, thinking perhaps now would be a good time to feel afraid. Instead she laughs. _You have his eyes._

He is smiling, she realizes, and kisses his bared, white teeth. 

 

 

Melisandre breathes life back into the Lord Commander, and now nightfires burn at every corner of the castle, throw a hundred shadows a hundred ways. Patchface sings in the halls, bells jangling. Her mother prays. “Be brave, child,” the priestess says, but what is there to be brave for? The darkness has always loved her.

Colder, colder. And the days grow short. She remembers her dream. She remembers the burning stag at her feet, the smell of its skin. 

In her bed she hears noises that come from far away, beyond the Wall itself. Whispers and scratches and ancient words, like giant-speak, like the Old Tongue, like the sound of the king’s skeleton, poking at the lid of its case. “Unclean,” she tells herself. 

Something within—a worm, a dragon—is pushing at the center of her chest. It is a pain of sorts, but she cherishes it. The fire, she knows, will scald her white as a bone, but ice is another matter altogether. Cold preserves.

 

 

 

It is dusk when she asks a Brother to take her up in the cage. “The queen will not like it,” he frets, but she straightens her spine and looks him in the eye, says, “I’m a queen now.” Queens are not children of one and ten. Queens do as they please. 

She lets him hold her by the arm when they stand at the top, for the wind is screaming down from the north and threatens to pluck her away altogether. She peers over the edge and into the endless world beyond, the trees and snow and mountains she can no longer see in the coming dark. _It’s just as I dreamed_. 

“Your Grace,” the man mumbles, shivering.

“Please,” she tells him. “Please be quiet.” _I’m listening._ Inside the castle it was so hard to hear, but up on the Wall—

She closes her eyes, briefly, does not smile. It is her name. Surely it is her name. They are calling her through. 

Shireen digs her heels into the gravel beneath. Wights and Others and who knows what else, hissing. Her hand finds her cheek. 

She thinks to reply, to speak back, in the language she has been taught since birth, since every voice about her said she was marked for death, but instead she bites her tongue, tastes blood. Not yet. Soon, but not yet. 

“You may take me down now,” she tells the Brother, and he obeys.

**Author's Note:**

> i'd love a happy ending for shireen but i'd also love for her to become an ice/stone monster (guys what if she _is_ the stone dragon). _i'm so torn._


End file.
